Is baby urine really useful?

I once heard an ancient fable: Someone spit out white phlegm, which some people said looked like goose down. According to legend, someone later said that he spit out a goose feather. People continued to tell each other, and finally someone said that the man had vomited up a big white goose!

Although this fable is a bit exaggerated, in our real life, it is not uncommon for such hearsay and biased beliefs to occur, which can cause jokes at best, or affect people's health at worst.

The saying that children's urine can cure diseases or provide a great tonic does have its historical and cultural roots. According to ancient Chinese Materia Medica records, the urine and feces of humans and animals can be used to treat difficult and complicated diseases. For example, Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica" calls human urine the reincarnation wine and Huanyuan Decoction, which is especially good for boys. Just like the theoretical framework of traditional Chinese medicine, the use of human urine to treat diseases has its own fantasy elements. After some products of human urine are used as medicine, it is said that it can not only treat cold and heat headaches and abdominal distention, but also improve eyesight and sound, moisturize the skin, benefit the large intestine, remove coughs and lung diseases, quench thirst, moisturize the heart and lungs, stop vomiting blood, and treat epistaxis. Difficult labor, retained fetus, snake and dog bites, etc. Ancient humans had a chaotic and ignorant understanding of nature, and of course there is no need to criticize them harshly. But now that mankind has entered the 21st century, with prosperous science and advanced medicine, it is worth pondering if we still copy the practices of the ancients without analysis.

With a little analysis, you can know that there is no scientific reason for using human urine to treat diseases or to supplement. First, let’s take a look at what ingredients are in human urine. Urine is basically water and contains a small amount of inorganic salts and urea, so it has a salty taste. In addition, urine may contain trace amounts of metabolites of sex hormones, adrenocortical hormones or other body components. A few years ago, many urine buckets were placed in public toilets in some places to collect urine. It was said that they were used to extract urokinase, a thrombolytic drug. However, the content of these substances in urine is very small and it is impossible to produce any pharmacological effects.

What about child urine? Although the treatment of children's urine diseases has been spread among the people, and in the 1950s, there were many related reports in Chinese medical magazines, such as the prevention and treatment of measles with eggs soaked in urine. In fact, there is no difference between child urine and adult urine. In the imagination of some people, children are full of vitality, and there must be some "vital energy" in the virgin body, and the "vital energy" must have a tonic effect, so they think that "boiled eggs in the urine of a child are very tonic." In fact, this is just as blind obedience as believing in deer fetus, sheep fetus, and chicken embryo supplements. However, "boiled eggs in child's urine" is really a "great tonic" for people suffering from famine and malnutrition. It is not because of the child's urine, but because of the eggs.

So, why did Dongyang’s “boy urine boiled eggs” become so popular? This is the result of social psychological factors at work, and is the result of the herd behavior of the masses blindly trusting and imitating without analysis. Of course, it is also related to our cultural traditions and ways of thinking. The fable mentioned at the beginning of this article illustrates this tendency very well. During the recent SARS period, the rush to buy white vinegar and isatis roots in many places was the same as the popularity of "boiled eggs in child urine".